You Say You Want A Revolution?

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Emerging economic strategies may
hold the key to broadening democracy
and enhancing environmental
protection at the same time.

Since the modern
environmental movement was born in the 1970s, enormous funds and energies have
been expended globally to understand and cure our environmental ills. The
result has been some spectacular successes-the Montreal Protocol to control
chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions and preserve the stratospheric ozone layer
usually springs to mind-as well as growing understanding of the Earth's
ecosystems and our effects on them, and a widely expressed commitment (at least
on paper) to their health. In most countries, nearly everyone says he or she is
an environmentalist.

So why don't the trends look
better? Consider a few examples from Vital
Signs, Worldwatch's periodic look at environmental indices. Nearly one in four
mammal species is in serious decline. The Earth's ice cover is melting as global
average surface temperatures continue to rise, due in major part to the largely
unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. Half of the world's wetlands, key
ecosystems that protect enormous numbers of species and provide critical
ecological services, have disappeared since 1900 to pollution and development.
During the 1990s, the planet lost 9.4 million hectares of forest every year-an
area about as large as Portugal. In general, despite more than 30 years of
modern achievement-and well before the Bush era-many of the most important
environmental trends have been moving steadily in the wrong direction.

There are three types of progress
on the environment. First are absolute "breakthroughs" in connection with
discrete problems, such as the near-total elimination of DDT and lead. These
are important but limited in number and overall impact. The second type
includes a range of policies, programs, and regulatory efforts which serve to
"do something about" a critical environmental problem but only retard, rather than
reverse, a major trend. Thus the U.S. wetland-loss rate has slowed, yet losses
in the 1990s continued at over 20,000 hectares a year. Likewise, in the United
States gains were made for awhile in average passenger car fuel mileage, but
these were overwhelmed by a rise in the number of cars, a shift to less
efficient light trucks and SUVs, and an increase in miles driven.

The third type of achievement
actually reverses the direction of a destructive long-term trend. Examples
include the Montreal Protocol mentioned above (which, despite a post-ban black
market in CFCs, has vastly reduced their release into the atmosphere), certain
air- and water-pollution reductions, and the clean-up of Lake Erie.

Unfortunately, even before the Bush
Administration's destructive policies, most environmental gains were in the
second category: they did very useful things, but the positive achievements
were not sufficient to reverse long-term negative trends. And that's clearly
not good enough.

How do we get ourselves unstuck?
Any strategic effort to get at and ultimately reverse these trends must begin
by confronting the implications of an obvious truth: whatever people's true
feelings about the environment, they will under­standably choose jobs over the
environment when the two appear to conflict. Air and water pollution, for
example, is commonly difficult to deal with at the local level because citizens
and political leaders fear the loss of jobs that a challenge to corporate
polluters might produce, even when the threat is severe. The citizens of Pigeon
River, Tennessee, for instance, chose a few years ago to tolerate potentially
carcinogenic emissions by North Carolina's Champion International paper mill
because of fear they might otherwise lose 1,000 jobs. A 51-year-old worker who
supported keeping the plant open despite the danger spoke for many: "What do
you do when you're my age and faced with the prospect of being thrown out on
the street?"

If we are unable to solve the jobs
problem, there will be continued political opposition to important
environmental measures that might cause economic dislocation. On the other
hand, to the degree communities can be assured of economic stability, their
ability to deal with environmental problems can clearly be greatly enhanced.

A Thousand Blooms

To accomplish this, however,
would require the environmental movement to develop a much broader strategic
approach and, with it, new allies. Is this possible? And not simply with labor
unions, but with a range of other key groups in local communities?

There are hopeful signs.
Environmentalists have demonstrated a capacity both to expand the agenda and to
create new allies in some areas in recent years. In connection with sprawl, for
instance, for many years the primary emphasis was on policies to constrain
growth. However, many now realize that the outward-moving pressures that
contribute to sprawl are often the result of economic development failures in
the central city. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution puts it this way: The
"flip side of the rise in concentrated urban poverty is the surge in suburban
and exurban sprawl."

In response, a number of groups
have added community economic strategies to their once narrowly environmental
agendas, and in doing so have found new allies. For instance, Miami's "Eastward
Ho! Brownfields Partnership"-a collaboration of government agencies, community
organizations, and private groups working to redirect development in southeast
Florida-is working hard to promote "infill" development to revitalize Miami's
urban core and other coastal communities and thereby reduce development
pressures on the Everglades. Maryland's Smart Growth & Neighborhood
Conservation Initiative follows the same political-economic logic.

A larger, longer-term strategy
would build on such ideas and organize broad coalitions around specific
policies and new economic institutions aimed at community economic and
environmental security. And although national political action, at least in the
United States, is stymied in many areas at present, there are growing
possibilities-and indications of a potentially major shift-at the state and
local levels.

Just below the radar of media
attention there has been a quiet explosion of new state and local policies
aimed at retaining jobs, building greater local self-reliance, and increasing
local economic "multipliers" so that money spent in a community recirculates to
produce additional jobs. For example:

U.S. state governments now regularly shape public
procurement to boost local economies. Community-based small businesses, for
instance, can receive a five-percent preference on bids for state contracts in
California, New Mexico, and Alaska.

Many cities (roughly half the municipalities in a recent
survey) use public contracts to help neighborhood-anchored community
development corporations (CDCs) and simultaneously improve the delivery of
government services.

Publicly sponsored "buy local" programs are widespread. The
Rural Local Markets Demonstration in central North Carolina identifies products,
services, parts, and raw materials that manufacturers would like to purchase
locally, and then assists other local firms with the development of such
products and/or helps establish new local firms to fill the supply gap.

Pension funds now regularly seek ways to enhance local
economic health. More than half of U.S. states have established Economically
Targeted Investment programs to promote investments that help communities.

Perhaps even more importantly, an
extraordinary range of new economic institutions that both anchor jobs and
change the nature of wealth ownership are also at the threshold of potentially
explosive strategic expansion. For example, roughly 11,000 substantially or
wholly employee-owned businesses are now operating around the country. More
people are involved in these firms than are members of unions in the private
sector. Not only is the record of such companies impressive, their capacity to
anchor jobs is of extreme importance to community stability; few companies
owned by local employees ever get up and move to Mexico! Moreover, many
worker-owned firms are also on the cutting edge of environmental sustainability
efforts. Cranston Print Works in Rhode Island, for instance, has regularly won
awards for reducing its use of toxics. The office furniture and services firm
Herman Miller, Inc. has been recognized by the National Wildlife Federation and
the state of California for outstanding reductions in material waste. Kolbe and
Kolbe, which makes windows and doors, has dramatically reduced its hazardous
waste output as a result of suggestions by employee-owners.

Worker-owned firms are not the only
emerging institutional form that can help stabilize local economies and change
who owns and benefits from wealth. For instance, there are now roughly 4,000
neighborhood-based community development corporations actively at work in all
parts the United States (by some estimates, 6,000). More than 115 million
Americans are members of cooperatives. Hundreds of new land trusts are now
operating in diverse communities. Numerous municipalities, under both
Democratic and Republican mayors, have established little-noticed but important
publicly owned city enterprises.

When there is determination and
clarity of vision, these institutions can resolve the apparent conflict between
community job creation and ecological sustainability. Many municipalities, for
instance, create jobs and generate revenues through land fill gas recovery
business enterprises that turn the greenhouse gas methane (a byproduct of waste
disposal) into energy. Riverview, Michigan, now recovers more than 4 million
cubic feet of methane daily. In turn, the sale of gas for power production
helps produce over 40,000 megawatthours of electricity per year and generates
revenues for the city. Similar recovery efforts can be found in all parts of
the country. Among the many other innovative and successful methane recovery
operations are those run by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community
Affairs, the South Carolina Energy Office, Los Angles County, and the city of
Portland, Oregon.

Local Services Rule

A few examples don't make a
movement. But recent research suggests that the policy and institutional
experience necessary to mount a much larger and longer-term national effort
focused on community economic and environmental security is developing fast.
There are also important sectoral changes under way that, over time, could
elevate such an effort from marginal to strategic, above all the decline of
manufacturing.

In 1950 fully 31 percent of the
U.S. non-farm work force was involved in manufacturing. Twenty years later such
employment had slipped to 25 percent, and by 1990 it was 16 percent. Currently
those working in the manufacturing sector number only a little over 11 percent
of the labor force, and this figure is projected to decline further. The fact
is that the U.S. economy has for many years been dominated by services-a sector
that is far more locally oriented, more stable, and less dependent on (or
sensitive to) the vagaries of global trade than manufacturing. (Only 5-7
percent of U.S. services are exported.) Though rarely noted in the overwhelming
media focus on manufacturing, these ongoing sectoral changes favor more stable,
locally oriented economic development. The work of economist Thomas Power, in
fact, suggests that "about 60 percent of U.S. economic activity is local and
provides residents with the goods and services that make their lives
comfortable. This includes retail activities; personal, repair, medical,
educational, and professional services; construction; public utilities; local
transportation; financial institutions; real estate; and government services.
Thus almost all local economies are dominated by residents taking in each
other's wash."

Locally oriented economic activity
increased from 42 percent in 1940 to 52 percent of total community economic
activity in 1980. Over the period from 1969 to 1992, Power notes, "the
aggregates of retail and wholesale sales, services, financial and real estate,
and state and local government" have been making up "a larger and larger
percentage of total earnings, rising from 52 to 60 percent...." As economist Paul
Krugman puts it, "Although we talk a lot these days about globalization, about
a world grown small, when you look at the economies of modern cities what you
see is a process of localization: a steadily rising share of the work force
produces services that are sold only within that same metropolitan area."

In short, a determined effort to
make local economic and environmental security a strategic priority would be
working with, not against, the grain of ongoing sectoral change. A long-term
initiative aimed at building up state and local alliances might accordingly
hope to create the political and experiential basis of a national capacity to
undercut the job fears that weaken local environmental efforts.

Far more is at stake, however, than
local economics, or even environmental policies. Any serious attempt to deal
with the longer-term sources of our difficulties will ultimately have to come
to grips with questions of democracy, on the one hand, and a more
environmentally supportive culture, on the other. Although almost everyone
gives lip service to such abstractions, the real question is whether it is
possible to begin taking them seriously as a matter of policy and strategic
commitment.

democracy and Democracy

This brings us to the
demanding implications of really "Thinking
Globally and Acting Locally." In recent years several theorists have focused
attention on the first of these implications: what it takes to truly nurture
democracy. In his widely discussed book Bowling
Alone, Robert Putnam probed well beneath surface indicators of democratic
engagement, such as the fall-off in voting, to focus on the decline in local
citizen associations, networks, formal and informal clubs, neighborhood groups,
unions, and the like. He suggested that this decline, in turn, had weakened the
foundational requirements of democracy in general. What is not at the center of
this analysis are national political parties, national interest groups,
national lobbying, national campaign finance laws, or national political
phenomena. Important as these are, what Putnam and others have increasingly
stressed is the micro-level of citizen groups and citizen involvement. Here is
the place to begin to look for democratic renewal in general. If you can't have
Democracy without democracy, then a necessary (if not sufficient) condition of
rebuilding the former is to get to work locally.

It's an old lesson, putting into
modern form Tocqueville's contention that in "democratic countries knowledge of
how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge...." John Stuart
Mill, another 19th century theorist, likewise held that direct experience with
local governance was essential to "the peculiar training of a citizen, the
practical part of the political education of a free people. ...[W]e do not learn
to read or write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by
doing it, so it is only by practicing popular government on a limited scale,
that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger."

The critical question, of course,
is what are the real-world conditions required to make this meaningful?
Citizens' participation in local community efforts is all but impossible if the
economic rug is regularly pulled out from under them. Indeed, what precisely is
the "community" when "citizens" are forced to move in and out of a locality
because of volatile economic conditions? And who has any real stake in long-term
decisions?

Real community democracy requires
real community economic health and the kinds of institutions which can sustain
it. Any serious longer-term community economic and ecological security effort,
accordingly, must take seriously what it will require to rebuild the local
basis of democracy.

It should be obvious where this is
leading: economic instability radically weakens all forms of civil society
network-building, including those that nurture democracy and communities'
interests in their environments. Conversely, strategies that help achieve local
stability produce, at the same time, a more supportive context for
democracy-building civil society associations in general, and for citizen
organizations concerned with the environment in particular.

Moreover, these local strategies
have ripple effects in both time and space. Research by Giovanna Di Chiro has
demonstrated how the agendas of grassroots groups commonly evolve from
defending a localized "place" orientation to supporting broader, more universal
concepts of environmental justice. Raymond DeYoung, Stefan Vogel, and Stephen
Kaplan have examined the diverse ways that direct local participation builds
stronger environmentally oriented attitudes in general. The resulting changes
in consciousness-and in "acceptable" standards and norms of environmental
management-are critical, in turn, to producing support for broader, longer-term
national policy change.

Prospects

I believe that we are
quietly approaching a time when there may be a realistic chance of
systematically laying the structural foundations at the state and local level
for a long-term strategy aimed not only at undercutting the economic
instability which weakens efforts to control pollution, but of attempting to
nourish the basis of a re-energized democratic and ecologically healthy
culture.

I concede that the idea of building
a new long-term agenda is daunting, especially given the difficulties of the
Bush era. On the other hand, other historical periods of great difficulty have
often given way to positive change, often in significant part because
individuals have been forced to reassess and develop new strategies.

Years ago I was legislative
director for the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day. Nelson
had been a "conservation governor." When he was first elected to the U.S.
Senate, the idea that environmental issues might one day become important in
America seemed far-fetched. Indeed, everyone knew this was a non-starter. Over
only a very few short years, however, what seemed impossible became an
extraordinary movement.

In the pre-1960s South, the idea
that the odds against change were too high was also widespread-and here the
odds were enforced not simply by reactionary politicians but by deadly terror.
Blacks, and even some white Americans, were murdered for demanding their basic
rights. To many in the South in the 1930s and 1940s the possibility of change
seemed far more distant than it does to today's environmental movement. And yet
those working against the odds ultimately laid the foundation for an
extraordinary explosion of positive change.

Most people also tend to forget how
marginal conservative thinkers and activists were in the 1950s, even before the
Goldwater debacle of 1964. The ideas and politics that currently dominate
American reality were once regarded as antique and ridiculous by the mainstream
press, by national political leadership, and by most serious academic thinkers.
Committed conservatives worked in very difficult circumstances to develop their
ideas, practices, and politics for the long haul. And though I disagree with
them, they demonstrate what can be done against seemingly long odds when people
get serious.

All of this underscores a more
fundamental point: to suggest the realistic possibility of developing new
long-term alliances around a community economic and ecological security agenda
opens the door to embracing a larger overarching vision of comprehensive,
indeed systemic change-one that can help satisfy goals of democracy and
community writ large. It is not simply, therefore, a matter of policies and
alliances, though both are necessary. The only way ultimately to achieve the
motivation and committed energy needed for major change is to offer a morally
compelling realistic vision that goes beyond ecological issues to the question
of democracy itself.

Gar
Alperovitz is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of
Political Economy at the University of Maryland. This essay is based upon his
recent book America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Democracy,
and Our Liberty.